THE ASCENDANCE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
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nanobots shut down the signals coming from your senses, replace them
with the signals your brain would be receiving if you were in the virtual
environment. Now you can have full-immersion virtual reality incorpo–
rating all of the senses, so you can have any kind of experience with
anyone in these virtual environments. Virtual environments could be
emulations of earthly environments or creations of environments that
don't exist on earth . People will beam their whole flow of sensory expe–
riences out on the Internet the way people beam images from their web
cams today. You'll be able to plug in and experience what it's like to be
someone else,
a
la
Being John Malkovich.
These can include the neuro–
logical correlates of our emotions. But most importantly we'll be able to
expand human intelligence . Right now we're limited to a mere hundred
trillion connections, and I don't know about you, but I find that very
limiting. Not a day goes by that I don't get a really compelling book that
I want to read, and hear about ten web sites that I want to visit and con–
ferences that I want to go to. But our bandwidth is just very limited.
We'll ultimately be able to expand those hundred trillion connections to
two hundred trillion or to a hundred trillion times a thousand, and also
have intimate connections to non biological forms of intelligence.
Keep in mind that biological intelligence is fixed. Today we have
IO'·
calculations per second in the human brain, and fifty years from now
biological intelligence will still be
IO '6.
Today, nonbiological intelligence
is about a million times less powerful than biological, so it appears that
biological intelligence will dominate. But non biological intelligence is
growing exponentially. The crossover point is in the
2020S .
But when
you get out to
2040, 2045, 2050,
nonbiological intelligence will be tril–
lions of times more powerful than biological intelligence. But it's not an
alien invasion of intelligent machines coming from over the horizon to
compete with us; it's emerging from within our civilization and literally
will be inside
OUf
bodies and brains. There's not going to be a clear dis–
tinction between computers and humans. Sometimes when I talk about
this, people think, well, I don't want to merge with a machine, because
they think of machines as much more brittle, much less subtle, much less
soft and cuddly than humans. Yet that's technology of the past, when
machines were millions of times simpler than humans. In the future,
technology will have the same subtlety and suppleness as our biology,
and it will be used to enhance our biological capacity. People say expo–
nential trends run out of steam; there's no way this can go on forever; it
will hit a wall and won't continue to expand. But the key point is that
the resources needed for computation and communication, for knowl–
edge, for all the things I've been talking about, are virtually zero. This
